Want
by Cassandra or Bonkers pehaps
Summary: You can tell a lot about someone when you ask them what they want... Some insights into various Burn Notice characters. R/R
1. Michael

**Want**

**I. Michael**

You want your old job back. You want all this Burn Notice shit to just end – you want people to know that it wasn't you that did all those things, that you aren't a traitor or a terrorist or a thief; you just want to be Michael Westen, superb, reliable agent again.

You want the simplicity of before, with all the different parts of your life in their neat, separate boxes. You want the simplicity of having a mission to do, and doing it, and getting sent out on another, without all the questions of who you are, and why you do what you do, and what for. You want your patriotism, the way it could wrap around and explain away and justify so much of what you did and didn't do, the way you could use it to push away guilt when you had to kill a man or when you dodged one of your mother's calls. You want the tactical support, the easy money and supplies and intel that being official gave you.

You want to sit in Dan's office and laugh over jokes and share your sardonic little observations about some operative or mission which he appreciated so well, even if he was your handler now, your superior (you'd trained together, years back, but he'd been recruited older and was as cut out for a desk job as you were repulsed by the very thought). You want the fourteen hour flights, the bad foods, the necessity of switching between three different languages in a two hour timeframe, the stays in five star hotels, the ease with which you bought your fancy suits.

You want Fiona, here with you, in your arms, in your bed, fighting with you, shooting at you, trying to punch you, backing you up, making bombs, in Belfast and Berlin and Miami even, anywhere, always. You want to run away from that want for fear that it will consume both of you.

You want all of these arrogant bastards to stop trying to use you. You want them to stop thinking that they can play with you. You want them to stop thinking that they can just take what they want from you, that they can rip your life apart and threaten your family, the people you love most, and get away with it. You want to figure out exactly what the hell is going on so that you can deal with the situation, so that you can put them all in their place, which would as far out of your life as possible.

You want, sometimes, not to have to do another job. You want the time and space to figure out your own problems, which are somehow never as simple and easy as solving everyone else's. You want to say no, really say no and just walk away, but you can't, because you know that they need help, that someone needs to deal with whatever the issue is properly and that if you don't nobody else will and you can't do that to them, not when ask you like that, you just _can't._

You want your mother to stop smoking like a chimney; you want her to stop calling you over for the most inconsequential things, even though you know why she really does it. You want your brother to succeed with this business of his, to really get his life together this time, even though you fear that he won't.

You want to let Sam enjoy his retirement with had lady-friends and his booze, even though you suspect he enjoys doing these jobs with you as much as anything else. It lets him stay in the game, after a fashion; there's a kind of thrill to the challenge of these things that for any half-decent operative is as strong a draw as any addiction.

You want something to do, something to analyze and plan, something to focus on so that you don't have to be alone with your thoughts, so that you don't have to dwell on all the things you have seen and done and all the things that were done to you. You don't want to have to think of your father every time you need to get something out of your mom's garage, or think of old missions best forgotten every time some old (or 'dead') associate drops into town. You want some decent equipment to work out on when you need to clear your thoughts.

Sometimes, you just want an ice cold blueberry yogurt after a dangerous mission or a tough job or a long day.


	2. Fiona

**II. Fiona**

You want a new gun – something custom-built, perhaps, with a lot of firepower, a lot of bang. Failing that, something older would also do: you like the classics, good guns with some history behind them; it's why you were so pleased that time Michael gave you a Markov for your birthday. A nice supply of ammunition would be nice too – any kind would do, really (you're sure you could find a use) because well, you can never have too much ammo, can you? You want something fun to blow up, a nice explosion with a lot of breadth to light up the sky like so many fireworks. Yes, you could definitely do with another chance to use some of your C-4.

You want Michael to get his head out of his arse and realize that there is more to life than just hunting down the people who issued his burn notice. You can understand, accept, approve of the impulse for revenge, but you know this is more and less than that to him, and how many years of his life is he going to waste? You want him to see that working for his little government wasn't nearly as noble and ideal as he wants it to be - how can he still wish to go back, knowing that some of them did this to him, and the rest accepted it, went with it, said nothing? You want him to realize how little difference there is, working for one side or other. You want him to see how much better, how much fuller his life has been since he came back to Miami – you want him to admit that his past isn't worth going back to.

You want your belongings back, all the things that were destroyed when Jesse decided to blow up your new house with that psychopath in it. You know he did it because he was quite rightly pissed off at you, and you can't really hold it against him (if someone had done to you what the lot of you did to him, having their house blown up would have been the least of it) but you certainly wish that you'd been a bit slower with the moving, something. You'd had pictures in there, books, guns, the snow globes – sentimental things that are largely irreplaceable. You know that this is how life goes sometimes, glowing disasters and so many things lost, but you still miss them. Maybe Sam was on to something, keeping all his treasures in that hidden storage unit – at least, whatever was happening to him, his more treasured things would be safe.

You want Claire back – God, how you want Claire back, even after all of these years. Claire, your sister with the beautiful smile, the ready laugh, the golden hair. You fought like mad sometimes (your mother would call you her little banshees when you were young) but you were closer to her than anyone else in the world. She was the baby of the family, the only sibling younger than you. You were only four when she was born but you insisted your mother let you carry her, take care of her. You watched her learn to walk. She was your little sister, yours to take care of the way your brothers took care of you, and you failed her. She died, eyes rolled upward, chocking on her own blood and she wasn't even sixteen and what kind of justice was there to that? You'd never been interested in politics before that or anything – you hated the British as a matter of course, sure, and plenty of people you knew, including three of your four brothers, were serving in the IRA or helping them somehow, but it was never something that really involved you, till then. Afterward – all you could think of was bloody murder, revenge, hurting as many of those bastards as you could manage. You went around your brothers, knowing they'd try to stop you, went straight to Jerry O'Reilly, a guy you only knew by sight from the neighborhood, a guy you knew was a some kind of IRA leader, and you demanded he let you join, and so your life became what it is now. You like this life, sure, but you'd give it up in a second, in an instant, if you could have Claire back again.

You want to go shopping – some new dresses, some cute shoes, a nice pair of sunglasses or two. You want Michael to stop dragging you out of those immeasurably boring surveillance missions. You want to win a couple games of poker with Madeline and her friends – funny, but you get along surprisingly well with them. You want the bail bondsman to throw you a couple of good jobs, the ones that pay well, because the jobs you do with Michael certainly don't much of the time and a girl's got to live somehow.

You want this truce or whatever it is between Michael and Jesse to last, because you like them both and because they work quite well together when one isn't threatening to kill the other. You want Michael to be more careful sometimes – he almost died that last time, you know, three days unconscious in the hospital and you getting more worried and more upset because you couldn't bare to lose him too, until you couldn't stand it anymore, the worry, and you kicked him, and somehow, again, that worked.

You want to be able to go back to Ireland again, to visit your old mum, to be with your brothers, to meet with old friends. You want to be able to walk down the streets of your childhood again without fear of getting shot, to pass the old church, to visit your sister's and father's graves. You hope you will again, someday. You hope that someday, home will be home again and not a place filled with old enemies just waiting to have their own revenge.

You want Michael to kiss you, because kissing Michael somehow isn't like kissing anyone else. Being with Michael, Michael's skin touching yours, the way he holds you, the intensity of it – ever since you first met Michael McBride you haven't really been able to satisfy yourself with anyone else, haven't found anyone else that could even compare.

You want a bit of a challenge to life, some excitement. You like the feel of adrenaline, of danger.


	3. Sam

_Had some trouble with this one...harder for me to get into Sam's head, apparently. Hope you think it's decent :0_

You want an ice cold beer, preferably some deliciously expensive German brand. Or, if circumstances allow (that is, if you aren't expecting a situation that requires most, if not all, of your faculties) a mojito would do quite nicely too. You always have liked your booze, the pleasantly burning, the way a good drink or two can take the stress right out of you. There have been times, yes, where you drank to forget, to try to obliterate every coherent thought from your mind, but those times were the exception rather than the rule. Mostly, when you get upset you stop drinking altogether. Better that way, safer to keep the drinking a pleasant-minded thing. Once you really start drinking out of misery – well, it's a slippery slope. You would know. Your mother drank that way, drank to try to drown out her demons, to fill some deep unfillable void. She was a quiet, sad drunk. "I feel like I don't know how to smile anymore," she would slur, running her fingers through your hair when you were still a kid. She died young too – which, you suppose, is what she wanted. Despite everything, drinking isn't about that for you. It isn't about getting trashed – in fact, you rarely drink to that effect. No, its about the pleasant buzz, the slight escape, the way it makes the whole world all around you so much nicer to be in. After all, life goes on the same whether you're high strung to all hell or whether you just sit back and enjoy it, isn't it?

You want a nice, well-off lady-friend to spend your evenings with. Someone like Veronica, or Ms. Reyolds. People call you a mooch, poke fun at your sugar mommas, which is fair enough, yes, but its always been about more than just money. You really do enjoy their company, not just the money but the role of being taken care of; truth be told, they like it too. So many of those older women, widows and divorcees mostly, spent their youths relying on men, being trophy wives, taken care of, paid for – for them its liberating, empowering, the role reversal your relationships entail. You don't mind either – two decades in the Navy and you have no need to strut around flaunting your masculinity. No, you're perfectly happy being their Sammy.

You want to be their Sammy, and really, you like your lady-friends older. A lot of men your age go after the young girls, skinny things with large perky breasts young enough to be their daughters. And yes, they are certainly nice to ogle now and then, but for your lady-friends, well, a girl like that would make you feel just a little too much like the dirty old man people occasionally take you to be. There's something to be said for experience – they may not have been to war with you, but women your age have been through a lot, generally, and it shows. You can connect with them, talk with them, laugh about eighties references, just understand each other, more or less. You can't have that with a girl half way through college, a girl who wasn't even born yet when you joined the SEALS. You just can't.

You want Mikey's life to settle down a bit, for him to work out his whole Burn Notice business and figure out his whole thing with Fiona, for him to be happy, whatever that might mean for someone like Mikey. You have a lot of buddies, really, male and female, older and younger, all of the place. You've always been that way, making friends almost effortlessly, chatting people up and getting to know half their life stories within a few hours of meeting them. In school, in the SEALS, in all kinds of out of the way places you were stationed in, you talked and joked and laughed, bought drinks, traded favors, flirted shamelessly, and your network of buddies just grew. None of them, though, are like Mikey. Some of your SEAL buddies might have been close, back in the day, but you've drifted apart over time. None of your buddies now would have saved your life the way Mike had, time and time again. None of them would have forgiven you so easily, so effortlessly, for informing on them the way he had. Most people, they would have been hurt, would have called you out for betraying them, for bugging their car, all of it. Mikey? No, he just let it go, like it was nothing! Mike, he was a true friend, the best kind of friend a guy could have, and yes, you want him to be happy.

And hell, you want him to stop stupidly risking his life, too. All the time he does it, getting into trucks, helicopters, boats and cars with all kinds of psychos, getting shot at, exploded. He never can let something go once he commits to it, no matter the danger. At least he eats healthy, you'll give him that - all those yogurts, him and Fi, always eating those yogurts in his loft, all that working out. You, you like yourself some sugar and grease from time to time but then, at your age, you feel you've earned it.

Come to think of it, what you really want is a bit of peace and quiet. Real peace and quiet, with no one going after Mike or Fi or Jesse or anyone else – maybe just a few jobs to do, nothing too exciting, some time in the sun, a long afternoon at Carlitos. Trite as it might sound, spend enough time in war zones, with gun runners and danger-magnet burnt spies as best friends, and well, the simple things in life start looking mighty appealing.


	4. Brennan

What you wanted – more than just about anything else at the time – was to beat Michael Westen, to win with a total, unquestionable victory.

You'd always been smarter than anyone else – in schoolyards and classrooms and in the street, you were the skinny, scrawny, short kid, the kid that was easiest to hit; but you knew from a very early age that you were smarter, that you could trick them, make them regret ever messing with you, and that you always did.

When you discovered chess (when your grandfather deemed you old enough to teach to play, though you'd wanted to learn for years) it was like clarity, a perfect metaphor for life: you were the ethereal, godly hand moving around the pieces in patterns only you could see. You played and read and played and read and tried not to hear your parents arguing, the bloody divorce, everything.

You wanted to see just how far you could take things, just how much smarter you could be, how many people you could manipulate just so easily. It never ceased to amaze you, how limited most people's vision could be, how they could only see what was in front of them and not far into the future, several moves ahead as it were.

Was it any wonder you took to a life of crime? How could you resist? You wanted everything, anything, as much as you could take from life; you wanted a challenge, and then another and another, and gun running and drug running, smuggling, trafficking and yes, even the occasional murder, was just so much more lucrative. You never felt guilty. It was their fault for being so simple-minded, so easy to beat, so pathetic.

You wanted to be different, extraordinary, rich, and so you took to that life, the world of a merchant of death, a world filled with shady characters, infamous colleagues like Victor Bout, that great Russian idiot. You met him, dealt with him a few times, reveled in how much smarter you were than he – you were not on every government watchlist of note, hunted my so many countries' security agencies, no, you were extraordinary and at the same time, barely visible at all. You liked to dress in gray and that too, was a metaphor: it made you different, but a muted sort of different, a kind that didn't catch the eye, that belied the danger you actually represented.

The first time you met Michael Westen it was only by the stupidest of chance. You'd wanted a certain piece of military hardware, and it had been simple enough to go through a list of capable thieves and find one that was ripe for blackmail – one that had been working conspicuously little of late, who was stupid enough to actually live with her child, so that just about anyone could find out about him and well. Yes, the easiest of plans, routine, and then that man had appeared, at first as pathetic as any other with his transparent lies, his stupid little attempts to trick you. You were so much better than all that and yet, somehow, by the end of things he'd gotten everything he wanted and you had to start a goddamn war just to get back your ability to move freely.

You hadn't wanted to believe it – your mind couldn't wrap itself around the idea that someone had actually outsmarted you. No, no, it had to have been a fluke. You would prove it. This time you would do your research, hit him where he was weak – his limo-driving brother, yes, there.

You'd marveled at his skill, had wanted to know just how he'd done the little tasks you gave him. You were a mastermind, yes, brilliant, but his ability to plot extemporaneously – well, even you had to admit, it deserved respect. Of course, that all went to shit when he beat you, again. This time the victory was unquestionable, for he had found your weakness, the one you went to so much trouble to squirrel away where no one could hurt her and still, he had found her, and from that stupid pin of all things. Your rage, your need, your desire to beat him, to even the score, to prove you were still (intellectually) the better was all-consuming.

You knew you would, if you were patient, working in the arena where you'd always been best – the long term. The investment you poured into watching Westen would be worth it – was indeed worth it, once you found out about the list. People (most people, people who weren't _him_) were so easy to control, and it was the simplest thing, after you learned of it, to find away to get it out of his hands and into yours.

You savored the victory, yes, had wanted to squeeze out of it every ounce of satisfaction you could, and every penny of profit, of course. There was something fitting about making Michael work for you, and when Larry Sizemore approached you, offering his assistance…well, why not? They would keep each other occupied while you took care of everything from above.

You had wanted to beat Michael Westen because he'd been the only man you ever met who had challenged you in the one area that you'd always been superior – brilliance. You had wanted to put him in his place. You had wanted revenge. You had wanted to make oodles of money. You had wanted to become even more of a legend among the high end international criminal community.

Instead you got a knife in the chest – from Larry, of all people, from a man who you'd regarded as a rook at best, a brutally useful tool, a wildcard to use to your advantage and irrelevant in the titanic struggle of brilliant minds waged between you and your arch-nemesis Westen. It was a shock, a flash of steel, pain before your mind could even comprehend what had just occurred. It didn't hurt for long. Larry, he gloated, yes, gloated and talked but even then his voice seemed so irrelevant. Your eyes found Michael's, his expression mirroring your own shock, horror, confusion.

You didn't beat me, you whispered, forcing the words out of a throat that was already forgetting how to breath. You didn't beat me, you thought staring at him as your heart (slowly, so slowly it seemed) lost its ability to beat and it was his face, not your sweet daughter's but his, that was etched in your mind those last moments before you ceased to exist.


End file.
